Hi,
I installed windows 10 on a portable hard drive with WinToUSB using the Bios/UEFI method. It worked on my older PC (about 8 years old), and on my works old laptop (no idea how old). I tried it on my wife's new laptop (roughly 3 months old), it wouldn't boot, it just goes to a blank/black screen. My work gave me a new HP zbook mobile workstation to replace my old laptop, and it too won't boot from the portable hard drive. After I select the USB hdd as the boot drive, it just goes to a black screen. After a few minutes i try hitting a few keys on the keyboard and it just starts beeping at me. I don't get any windows boot logos or warnings. I take it back to my older PC and it boots fine.

I had a look inside bios (luckily they didn't lock it down) and I can see that it's setup to boot in legacy mode and not UEFI. However, just to try a few different options,

I setup the hard drive to boot as UEFI and ran it through the process again. When I select the USB hard drive on my laptop, it just ignores it and goes to the next bootable option and starts booting up the internal hard drive.

I setup the hard drive to boot in legacy/BIOS mode and ran it through the process again. When I select the USB hard drive on my laptop, I just get the same blank/black screen as before.

I'm at a loss as to what to do, as it doesn't provide me with any error messages.

Looking through the link, unfortunately both of these newer computers are only USB 3.0 and I've tried every available usb port on the laptops. Unfortunately I won't be able to update the bios as it's a work PC and i don't want to break it.

I did installed on a partition which is 50gb. When I get home tonight I'll try shrinking the partition to 30gb and see how it goes.

I tried shrinking the volume down to 20gb and going through the wintousb process again. Unfortunately, still stuck at the blank / black screen. The portable hard drive is humming away but nothing is happening beyond that.

What tools do you use to create the partitions on the USB disk? Windows disk management or other third-party partitioning tool. And we recommend that you create the partitions using Windows Disk Manager.

(05-03-2016, 10:02 PM)admin Wrote: What tools do you use to create the partitions on the USB disk? Windows disk management or other third-party partitioning tool. And we recommend that you create the partitions using Windows Disk Manager.

I used "mini tool partition wizard". I'll explain a little more about the drive. It's a 2TB 2.5" portable drive, currently has a 1.8tb encrypted partition with veracrypt, a 300mb fat 32 partition, and a (now 26gb) ntfs system partition. It's currently formatted as mbr.

In its current format, it's using the 26gb ntfs partition as the boot and system partition for legacy compatibility. It's type is primary and it's currently the active partition. Does the order of the partitions matter? Just I noticed the veracrypt partition is the 1st one on the drive.

(05-03-2016, 10:02 PM)admin Wrote: What tools do you use to create the partitions on the USB disk? Windows disk management or other third-party partitioning tool. And we recommend that you create the partitions using Windows Disk Manager.

I used "mini tool partition wizard". I'll explain a little more about the drive. It's a 2TB 2.5" portable drive, currently has a 1.8tb encrypted partition with veracrypt, a 300mb fat 32 partition, and a (now 26gb) ntfs system partition. It's currently formatted as mbr.

In its current format, it's using the 26gb ntfs partition as the boot and system partition for legacy compatibility. It's type is primary and it's currently the active partition. Does the order of the partitions matter? Just I noticed the veracrypt partition is the 1st one on the drive.

You'd better set the FAT32 partition as the 1st partition, the NTFS partition as the 2nd partition, then followed by other partitions. And you need to select the FAT32 partition as the system partition and the NTFS partition as the boot partition when using WinToUSB to create a Windows To Go Workspace, then you can use it to boot both BIOS-based and UEFI-based computers.

Thanks, I've tried re-organising the partitions. However, I don't know what happened but I can't seem to be able to select a boot partition. I wasn't sure what was meant by "The destination boot partition must be 20% larger than the used space on source boot partition." but I figure it could relate to my problem. I tried creating different sized boot partitions but didn't have any luck in being able to select a partition. I also attempted a single fat32 formatted partition, but didn't get anywhere either.

(05-11-2016, 09:28 PM)Trozza Wrote: Thanks, I've tried re-organising the partitions. However, I don't know what happened but I can't seem to be able to select a boot partition. I wasn't sure what was meant by "The destination boot partition must be 20% larger than the used space on source boot partition." but I figure it could relate to my problem. I tried creating different sized boot partitions but didn't have any luck in being able to select a partition. I also attempted a single fat32 formatted partition, but didn't get anywhere either.

Screenshot below of the WintoUSB screen.

The boot partition must be a primary partition, it cannot be a logical partition.

(05-11-2016, 09:28 PM)Trozza Wrote: Thanks, I've tried re-organising the partitions. However, I don't know what happened but I can't seem to be able to select a boot partition. I wasn't sure what was meant by "The destination boot partition must be 20% larger than the used space on source boot partition." but I figure it could relate to my problem. I tried creating different sized boot partitions but didn't have any luck in being able to select a partition. I also attempted a single fat32 formatted partition, but didn't get anywhere either.

Screenshot below of the WintoUSB screen.

The boot partition must be a primary partition, it cannot be a logical partition.

Thanks, that was the issue! I only had the primary partition as the system partition.

Also I have installed Windows on the hard drive which has had it's partitions reorganised so that it goes System -> boot -> other partitions. It now all works. YAY! It's strange that the newer computers couldn't handle the partition order, when the older ones could.